Crowded tourist destinations have sparked increased debate about one of the most contentious travel issues of the year. In many popular tourist destinations, locals are looking to reclaim cities or local infrastructure is overstretched by the pressure of too many crowds.
News events and supporting data suggest that there are many overcrowded tourist destinations where it might be best to rethink travel plans, and many of these are on Fodor’s 2025 “No List,” which suggests 15 places where you might want to think twice before booking.
This year was the biggest year yet of news coverage at popular European tourist sites against perceived overtourism, starting early in April 2024 when Barcelona took a bus route off a tourist map because it was overrun with tourists heading to the second-most visited site in the city, the Antoni Gaudí’s Park Güell. One local joked that the next step might be to take the park off the map, too.
Site after site has announced plans to decrease tourism, from Lake Como in Italy touting the concept of an access fee, to citizens of the Canary Islands in Spain planning a hunger strike, and Amsterdam banning new hotels, giving only green. friendly with a unique approach, easy access and only if a lasting improvement is perceived over what existed before.
During the peak season, in July 2024, the situation has reached a critical point in many European locations. Locals sprayed tourists with water guns in Barcelona, waving banners saying “Go home”, and the mayor announced plans to ban Airbnb until 2028. Really fearing forest fires and water shortages due to the climate crisis, the Greek island of Santorini has banned construction. Water shortages are to blame for a 50% reduction in wine production on the popular tourist island, putting the local wine economy at an all-time low. Shortly after, Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis announced plans to limit cruises from 2025 to some of the most popular Greek islands.
In France, the island of Bréhat in Brittany in northern France has reintroduced a morning quota for overtourism. Soon after, it was Florence’s turn, when a tourist caused a stir by performing lewd acts in front of a statue of Bacchus, the Roman god of wine and excess, and locals shouted that the ancient city was more like Disneyland and that the arrests They deserved greater opposition. to the uprising. Sea of visiting tourists.
Many European cities have thought about limiting the number of tourists, as was the case in Japan with Mount Fuji, and the new tourist access fee in Venice turned out to be lucky enough to continue and expand until 2025.
Popular tourist destinations have also been defeated on the other side of the Channel. St Ives in Cornwall, known for its artsy atmosphere, home to painters, artisans and fishermen, has lost its seasonal balance. The city empties like a ghost in winter, but pierced by walls. -A wall of tourists in summer, its infrastructure creaks under the pressure.
After being named by The New York Times as one of the Best Places To Visit In 2024, the national park Bannau Brycheiniog in Wales, long held as a secret favorite by locals and its predominant sheep population, was overrun. Just 30 miles north of the Welsh capital, Cardiff, authorities were forced to put on extra buses and tour guides to cope with the 4 million visitors. Moreover, park officials had to ask the mass of influencers arriving to create content to adhere to ‘countryside morals’ and not strip down in the waterfalls to take selfies or treat the park like a beach. Many arrived in the national park known for its changeable weather and remote locales in flip-flops and bathing suits.
Indeed, in many places the reaction has been as much to ask tourists to behave as to reduce their numbers. Spain has started a crusade to ask visitors (especially British ones) to behave as they would at home, to change their clothes when on the beach and to sing loudly on residential streets early in the morning. tomorrow if they did it at dawn. their own countries.
The animosity in these places is as much economic as practical, whether it’s the waste left by departing tourists off cruise ships, the disrespectful behavior from Batchelor parties (heavily reported in Prague), the reduced access to local sites for locals or the lack of access to affordable housing as landlords choose to rent potential homes by the night instead of by the year to earn increased revenue.
Europe is the continent that is warming the fastest, so the environmental effects of tourism are very real, and many cruise operators are now choosing to head to the Caribbean instead of Europe, in part due to overcrowding.
Fodor’s ‘No List’ singled out 5 places:
Fodor defines them all as places in Europe “where the locals don’t know you. “
Fodor’s placed three main travel destinations for 2025 on a No List for tourists to visit next year: Bali, Koh Samui, and Mount Everest. In most cases, there is an urgent need for adequate waste management for the millions of arrivals.
Bali is almost back to pre-pandemic levels of travellers – 5. 3 million in 2023 to 6. 3 million in 2019 – and the 2024 numbers will likely look higher in the end.
The challenge is the waste control infrastructure, where the island is literally full of waste: it generates 303,000 tonnes of plastic waste every year, but only 7% is recycled, in what the NGOs present call a “plastic apocalypse”. They are disappearing and water is being polluted, basically through industry, mining, agriculture, aquaculture and domestic wastewater.
The island of Koh Samui is only 95 miles wide but had 3.4 million visitors in 2023, which increased by 10-20% in 2024.
Thailand’s Tourist Authority expects 1.56 million foreign travelers to visit the country throughout 2025–a 16% increase on 2023, and Chase Travel is already reporting that 2025 bookings are up 22% year-on-year.
Once again, the problem is the issue of waste disposal. Notably, 180-200 tons of trash are added daily without a proper way to treat it—much of it sits in a large landfill without a long-term solution. The issue will likely explode after the third season of The White Lotus airs (Sicily’s tourism soared by 50% after season two was set on its Italian coastline).
Mount Everest has long had an issue with overtourism, but with the main obstacle to ascent now being money rather than skill, anyone who pays can go, getting locals to carry all the gear and taking all the risks.
58,000 people stopover each year and stopovers at Sagarmatha National Park, which includes Mount Everest, have doubled in the last 25 years.
The challenge is that travelers generate 1,742 pounds of feces and other trash each day, and the government is scrambling to get rid of it. Currently, there are no limits on climbing permits, threatening this fragile ecosystem.
There is another category of places on Fodor’s ‘No List’ for 2025: those where destinations are starting to suffer from overtourism. There are seven places on this list:
Agrigento will be the Italian Capital of Culture in 2025, and suffering a severe water crisis, the British Virgin Islands possibly has too many cruise arrivals for local resources to keep up, and Kerala has suffered devastating landslides and environmental degradation due to overdevelopment.
Fodor reports that the term “Kankō kōgai” or “tourist pollution” has entered popular culture due to unease over the uncontrolled growth in the number of tourists in Japan, where numbers are reaching unprecedented levels, basically because tourists are taking advantage of the weak yen.
The people of Oaxaca, Mexico, say their local culture and customs are being commercialized, with English overtaking Spanish as the dominant language and one of Scotland’s most scenic tourist road routes. The North Coast 500 through the North Highlands is crowded and facilities are lacking, causing visitors to go crazy. camp, leaving in its wake “burn marks from campfires, garbage, disposable grills and even human feces. “
Many of these places on Fodor’s List that appear to be suffering from overtourism have recently topped travel lists for 2025. The Canary Islands and Japan were both named on Bloomberg’s Where To Go In 2025. And Japan, Spain, and Greece were featured highly in CNTraveler’s 2024 Readers’ Choice Awards for the 20 Best Countries in the World.
The issue of overcrowding is complex, often because these regions rely on the economic prosperity that tourism brings. Still, many have infrastructure that cannot cope, notably with the waste produced. But it’s also about local access to local resources, which has hit a wall in many of the large European cities, with local protests increasing in scale, and methods. Laws to curb visitors are more and more likely into 2025 and beyond to control overcrowded tourist destinations.
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